Colin Cotterill was born in London, but has lived in southeast Asia in recent years. He trained as a teacher and has also worked in child protection. Colin also produced a language teaching series for Thai TV. As well as writing crime fiction, he is also a cartoonist.RTE: Describe yourself in a sentence?

Cotterill: The type of compulsive maniac who’d spend four days working on answers to a pop interview rather than the 15 minutes it deserved just so he can look more interesting and appear more humorous than all the other writers.

RTE: What's the one record you'd take to a desert island?

Cotterill: A record? I don’t… No, wait. I remember my granddad talking about such things.

RTE: What did you want to be when you were growing up?

Cotterill: I wanted to be a train driver and an architect. As I couldn’t choose between them I saw myself in the cab of the 8:19 to Waterloo sketching cathedral plans on the windshield. It turned out I have a mental aversion to straight lines so both of these career paths were ditched before my 12th birthday.

RTE: Who's your oldest friend?

Cotterill: My mum. Honest. She’s the only one to have suffered me all this time.

RTE: If I ruled the world...

Cotterill: I would ban unattractive and badly-postured people from being naked on the internet and in public places. And that includes me. In fact, if I rule the world I might as well impose a tax on them being naked in the privacy of their own homes too.

RTE: Which book do you wish you'd written?

Cotterill: Anything by Dan B or Kathy R that grossed over a million so I could give up this ridiculous career and get back to something more important like Sudoku.

RTE: What makes you angry?

Cotterill: People who kill dogs.

RTE: Name your five dream dinner party guests.

Cotterill: Victoria Beckham, Mike Tyson, Susan Boyle, Paris Hilton and G.W. Bush. (I’ve never been the smartest person at a dinner party before).

RTE: Who would you least like to be stuck in a lift with?

Cotterill: Margaret Thatcher – even when she was 17 and drop-dead gorgeous in a one piece bathing suit that didn’t quite cover the left cheek of her pert buttocks.

RTE: What inspired you to start writing?

Cotterill: Following the demise of my train driving career I decided I should be a cartoonist. (No straight lines.) I’d send illustrations to newspapers and magazines and they’d say, ‘Sorry, they don’t fit anywhere.’ So I started to write articles tailor-made for my pictures. They kept the articles and got other people to illustrate them.

RTE: Where would you most like to live?

Cotterill: One of those summer homes with temperamental boilers on a big lake in Boondocks USA where all the serial killers live and there’s nobody within 20 miles to hear you scream.